75 years ago today, “It’s a Wonderful Life” opened at the Globe Theatre in New York. It had been slated for a January premiere, but was bumped up to qualify for Academy Awards consideration. The film would be nominated in five categories, including those for Best Picture, Best Director (Frank Capra), and Best Actor (James Stewart).
It’s amazing that nobody involved in the making or distribution of the film seemed to regard it, from the start, as a Christmas movie. “It’s a Wonderful Life” received mixed reviews and was something of a box office disappointment. However, decades later, it attained classic status through incessant television broadcasts around the holidays, back when the film was still in the public domain.
When Republic Pictures finally realized the value of what it had lost, after having allowed the copyright to lapse in 1974 (opening the floodgates for anyone to exhibit the film without having to pay them a fee), the studio was determined to regain control of the property, which it did in 1993. It accomplished this by pushing its ownership of both the original story, upon which the film was based, and the film’s music score, by Dimitri Tiomkin. Now, legally, no one is allowed to show “It’s a Wonderful Life” without the studio’s express permission, as long as those components are intact. Republic wasted no time in signing a long-term agreement with NBC, which holds onto its broadcast rights like grim death.
Capra himself thought the film his finest achievement. Interestingly, while many would be inclined to agree with him, “It’s a Wonderful Life” has also generated its share of backlash, with some finding it too dark, and others put off by its sentimentality. Too bad for them. It’s a fascinating movie, full of heartwarming snapshots of a world that probably never was. But damn it, I’m in love with the vision (and also with Donna Reed).
It was a novel approach, to turn “A Christmas Carol” on its head and have the idealistic hero (as opposed to Old Man Potter) be the one who winds up desperately in need of redemption. The explosion of joy at the film’s climax would leave Alastair Sim winded.
Tiomkin’s original score, which even alludes to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” (not heard in the final film), was issued only last month on La-La Land Records. The restoration is fabulous, considering the source material, like the film, is now 75 years-old. The album contains Tiomkin’s original thoughts, which were butchered in the editing and looping of the film. The release also contains a number of bonus tracks, including alternate takes, source music, music for the film’s trailer, and a “single,” with vocals, of the movie’s love theme, proposed for broadcast. A missed opportunity, for sure, as it was only six years later that Tiomkin would kick off the mania for main title songs with his Academy Award winning “The Ballad of High Noon.”
“It’s a Wonderful Life” is not my favorite Tiomkin score, by a long shot. I much prefer the music he wrote for Capra’s “Lost Horizon,” which didn’t have all the shotgun, cartoony allusions to classical, pop, patriotic, and folk melodies that were the stock-in-trade for Capra’s populist fantasies (like “You Can’t Take It with You,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” and “Meet John Doe”). Only Tiomkin would juxtapose “Ave Maria” with “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
Even so, the score works great on record. There are many differences from what we’ve become familiar with from the film, since entire sequences of Tiomkin’s original conception were jettisoned as the movie was repositioned for a Christmas release. Heartbreakingly for the composer, the film’s music editor began to draw heavily on pre-existing cues from the RKO music library, in spackling together the soundtrack for certain key sequences.
Tiomkin called the finished project “an all-around scissors job.” Though he and Capra would remain friends, they kept their distance for a year and a half, and then they never worked together again.
There’s no question this release of the film’s original score is evocative. It’s at its most interesting when it plunges into the dark side, and then swings back hard to the light. You really get a sense of the scope of Tiomkin’s vision as he brings the love theme to its apotheosis. As an unapologetic fan of the film, La-La Land’s soundtrack release is one I wouldn’t want to be without.
https://lalalandrecords.com/its-a-wonderful-life-75th-anniversary-remastered-limited-edition/
Believe it or not, I once owned one of the 200 original copies of “The Greatest Gift,” the 4,100-word story upon which “It’s a Wonderful Life” is based. It was self-published by Philip Van Doren Stern in 1943 to be distributed to his friends as a kind of Christmas card. For years, I was living hand-to-mouth as a young book dealer in Philadelphia, and regrettably I wound up having to sell it in order to pay the rent. It’s now listed, if you can find a copy, for thousands. Not that I’d ever sell it now. It’s one of my life’s great regrets – of those that don’t involve other people – to have had to part with it. I sold it to a real creep, too. But at least he paid cash.
